


Prompt: Superspeed, Secrets and Poker.

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [44]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Codependency, M/M, Pietro is a little shit, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-06
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-25 04:19:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6179956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vision nods and sits, soft and silent, on the stool between the beds. Wanda’s fingers loop gently through her brother’s, and the lines on both their brows ease as her breath evens out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prompt: Superspeed, Secrets and Poker.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wandasmaximoffs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wandasmaximoffs/gifts).



> Written as a promptfic for a dear friend over on tumblr, you may read it over there [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/140588957365/011312-iguana-mama-my-favourite-thing-is-when).

**i.**  
When Pietro first comes back he sleeps a lot. No one is entirely sure _why_ ; by all logic he should be fine, but he does all the same. At first they took him to medical when it happened, but after a week or so with no reason forthcoming they simply insist Pietro rest when he needs to. 

Not that this stops Pietro from knocking out for no apparent reason in the middle of training sometimes.

 _Stop running so much_ , Wanda sends to his mind when he wakes. _You’ll exhaust yourself more_.

 _And keep to training?_ Pietro sends back, grinning. _Booooring._

Wanda’s hand tangles through his hair. “Do not exhaust yourself,” she says aloud. “Or I will start to carry you with my scarlet.”

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
When Pietro needs to sleep after the first few weeks Wanda carries him back to the room they share. Two beds at right angles rest at the wall, a soft stool between them, and there Wanda sits, holding her brother’s hand and reading.

 _Sleep_ , Wanda pushes into his mind, sometimes, if he seems about to stir after only five minutes. Other times she pushes good memories into his mind, and tucks away the nightmares into the dreys and cavity dens hidden in his tree.

Sometimes the others drop by, checking on them, wondering, and none more so than Vision.

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
“You are well?” Vision asks, standing at the door. He no longer has his cape constantly, and his silhouette still seems odd to Wanda without it.

Wanda nods. “Just watching Pietro.”

“And reading,” Vision says. Not a question but a statement, and yet somehow not rude. 

“ _A Little Princess_ ,” she says, tilting the book so he can see the cover. “Natasha gave it to me.” On the cover a young girl cradles a doll close, dark hair and dark eyes and shades of painted brown.

Vision nods, still standing in the doorway and Wanda smiles very slightly. “Come in,” she says. “Or go if you want. Do not just _stand_ there.”

Vision steps in.

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
Sometimes, instead of reading, Wanda thinks. Usually it is sparked off by whatever thoughts are running through her brother’s sleeping brain - the burning tearing of him being ripped from her is common enough that she has learned to soothe it away, but other memories are often more peaceful and she does not mind thinking of them. It is easy to lean back against the wall, Pietro’s hand in hers, and remember her side of the memory his mind pulls up.

She remembers pulling the scarlet through her chest. It hadn’t... hurt, exactly. She’d been through things which hurt much worse than that, and it had felt more like pressure in the end, a surging scarlet storm forcing its way through her veins and muscles, through her very _bones_ to strike the doctor so she was free to check on Pietro.

She wonders if any of them truly noticed that, that she had done that, could do that, _would_  do that for her brother’s sake. She is certain that none of them, even the Vision who seems to put so much effort into understanding, quite comprehend the way they are as twins.

 

* * *

 

 **v.**  
Wanda is curled beside him when he wakes, which always means she has had a nightmare. He is careful to move slowly and not wake her, keeping her tucked safely against his chest as he sits up. He hears the soft _thunk_  of a book onto the ground, and makes sure Wanda is settled before plucking it up.

“ _Alice in Wonderland_ ,” says a voice, and Pietro blinks up to see the android there. “Forgive me,” he says. “I was coming to check on you both.”

Pietro pointedly watches him out of the corner of his eye as he flicks the book open. “You know the name because-?”

“I lent her the copy,” the android says. “Your sister asked for something new to read when I last came to check on you.”

Pietro hums quietly, and considers. He has never been that good at reading, least of all English, but he can pick the words from Wanda’s brain now, and it is easy to read the nonsense poem and wordplay with her mind’s aid.

“Do you often visit Wanda?” Pietro asks, and flicks carefully to the next page after noting where Wanda had been.

“I visit you both,” Vision says. “We all worry about you, and none more than your sister.”

Pietro huffs, strokes a free hand through Wanda’s hair. “Always worrying,” he murmurs in Sokovian into Wanda’s hair, pressing a kiss to her brow. “You cannot make her stop worrying,” he says to the android. “She has done it all our lives.”

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
Pietro is not always awake the times that Vision visits, but now he knows to ask he does. Wanda fills him in each time he wakes, what new book he brought them, if there is food, what he said when he has said something.

“He speaks oddly,” Wanda says one day. “I do not think he always expects us to respond.”

Pietro knows what she means. The odd cadence of the android’s voice, the lack of weight to it... there is a freedom to it that makes him easy to talk to, and it would almost worry him if Wanda did not seem so certain he was honest when he said he did not want to do harm.

“He does not like violence,” Wanda says, and from the way she rubs her hands together he knows she senses a kindred spirit in the android in that regard. “That does not mean he will not _be_ violent. But he would rather not be.”

“Like you,” Pietro says, and lets his memories of Wanda’s purpose on the rock fill his mind.

“Or you,” Wanda says, and reminds him of all the times his violence has been solely for her sake and because of her will. “He is like us both, brother.”

Pietro supposes he should have known to consider more carefully when Wanda said that.

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
There are few people who are like them both, Wanda knows. She and Pietro have split themselves down precise lines, guiding and guarding, immediacy and planning, thoughtful and thoughtless. Pietro reacts, protecting them immediately, instinctively. She acts after planning their way, guiding them both to a safe future.

But beyond that, beyond that precise divide of purpose and self, they are the same. They always have been, always will be. They would both rather be safe, in the end, and both know that violence first never works. Just because Pietro reacts more readily with it does not mean he prefers it. Just because Wanda reacts more readily with peace does not mean she prefers it. They are creatures of fire, reactive as much as warming, and they did not think to find a kindred spirit in one so little a warrior.

Wanda wonders what it would take for Vision to become as they are, and have been since they were ten.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
Wanda does not know why her brother sleeps so much now, but she thinks she is starting to guess, peeling it out of his mind as he sleeps. He has never slept much, that she knows; he had always valued her protection before his own wellbeing, until she had pointed out that her protection _requires_  his wellbeing, and that he should care as much for himself as he did for her.

It turns out, as she combs through his mind, that he had barely slept at the castle, and even less when they had started to run experiments on how long he could last with his heightened metabolism. Add to that his watchfulness of her once they had been allowed out, his wariness when Ultron had been growing and remaking himself around them...

This is less sleep and more his body refusing to maintain the pace.

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
“Watch him,” Wanda asks Vision one evening. She is almost entreating, her hand in his, scarlet dancing over vibranium skin as she sets her book down, tugs back the covers of her own bed. “I have to sleep, and I can only keep him sleeping so long. Watch him? Make sure he does not go running.”

Vision nods and sits, soft and silent, on the stool between the beds. Wanda’s fingers loop gently through her brother’s, and the lines on both their brows ease as her breath evens out.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
“Wanda asked me to watch,” Vision says, when Pietro wakes the first time to see him watching. “I do not think she trusts you to rest without her ensuring it.”

Pietro almost laughs, squeezes Wanda’s fingers in his, and cannot help his smile at the scarlet that loops warmingly around them in response. “She does not trust me to not run. Even holding my hand,” he lifts their joined fingers, shows how Wanda’s fingers tighten around his with the movement, “She thinks I will go and exhaust myself again.”

There is quiet for a few moments and then Vision asks, “Will you?” His head is tilted just slightly to one side, the cogs and lenses of his eyes quite focussed on Pietro’s head and it reminds Pietro of the street cats Wanda so loved back in Novi Grad.

“If I get bored,” he says, shrugging. “It depends.”

“I could get you books,” the android offers. “Or a game, if you do not want to read.”

The smile on Pietro’s face turns almost nasty. “Can you play cards?”

 

* * *

 

 **xi.**  
Vision, it turns out, _can_  play cards, but he cannot spot tells even from only a metre away. Pietro, on the other hand, is as good at reading people as Wanda when it comes to playing this particular variant of Poker, and Vision is rapidly made glad they are only playing for secrets and not money or anything else.

“How fast can you fly?” Pietro asks, when the cards come up in his favour yet again. Vision is _reasonably_  sure this is not Pietro trying to show off his speed, or the speed equivalent of what Mr. Stark had called a “dick measuring contest” (Vision knows he would lose an actual one, given he has no genitalia to speak of). Vision considers and, eventually, shrugs.

“I do not know. I’ve yet to reach my speed limit in battle and I have had no reason to test it further yet.”

Pietro grins and Vision thinks that even when he is being, as Wanda called him “a little shit” he is oddly charming. “Can you break the sound barrier?”

“That,” Vision says, with infinite patience, “counts as another secret. You must win another round to know.”

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
When Wanda wakes Sokovian poker has devolved into strip poker, and her yell of surprise and subsequent fall out of her bed has Pietro almost cackling.

“I will cover myself, I will cover myself!” he promises, pulling a blue blanket from his bed as Wanda’s hands glow scarlet. “We did not think you would wake.”

“We did not,” Vision says when Wanda glances to him, eyebrows raised. “Pietro believed you would sleep for another three hours, and my own predictions suggested at least five.”

Wanda’s eyes are still narrowed when she looks at her brother, but she holds out her hands. “Deal me in,” she says. “And get  _dressed_  Pietro. We do not strip off when we are in the same room, remember?”

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
When the twins eventually sleep it is with Pietro leaning back against his bed, Wanda’s head in his lap and even Vision’s eyes drifting shut on the other side of the stool they were using as a central table. Pietro’s hands are drawing peaceful patterns through his sister’s hair - his sister who had been _winning_  the game of Sokovian secrets poker until he had insisted it was unfair and she was using her mind magic.

(She hadn’t, but she had decided to back out while she was ahead by five secrets)

Vision has found himself lulled to sleep by the twins soft chatter, barely noticing how readily they looped him into it, including what little he said. He did notice how they gave his words equal weight though, something they almost never did for any of the others, and watching the way the twins minds - bright blue and red like glowing embers - interlinked and intertwined was enough to make even him consider dozing. 

He wakes when Pietro does in the morning, their legs tangled in the gap between the twin’s beds, to the sounds of Wanda singing in the shower.

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Sometimes he does not have to go to the twins room to check on them. Sometimes, instead, he will find Pietro, pyjama’d and waving a pack of cards at his door instead.

“I promised Wanda that I would not go running, but she made me promise to go to you instead. Poker again?”

When Vision glances through the walls to see the scarlet mind that still interlinks with the blue mind in front of him he sees Wanda’s, resigned and sleeping and quite at peace.

“Come in,” he says. “I’m afraid I only have the one chair.”

“That’s fine,” Pietro says, and he is wearing that _grin_  again. “I will sit on the bed. It looks unused enough.”

 

* * *

 

 **xv.  
** “Your sister is very lovely,” Vision says, when Pietro eventually asks about the android’s behaviour around Wanda. “She is very kind and very clever and I enjoy her company.” **  
**

Pietro’s smile is an odd thing, and Vision does not know entirely how to parse it. “You sound like you want to date her,” Pietro says. There is no accusation to it, but it is said all the same, and seems almost to wait in the air for an answer.

“Maybe,” Vision says eventually. “But I am quite content with you.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments, Kudos and Crit are always welcome!


End file.
